Spanish War and Occupation

Picasso moved into his new Parisian studio, located on rue des Grands-Augustins, in the 6th arrondissement. It is in this studio that he painted, one of his most famous paintings: "Guernica" in 1937. Following an order for the Spanish pavilion of the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques, which takes place in Paris, Picasso must execute a painting. Initially wishing to represent a painter in his studio, as evidenced by some preparatory studies, Picasso is upset by an event on April 26, 1937.
Indeed, on that day the bombing of Guernica, a small Basque town in Spain, took place. The Nazi air force caused more than four thousand deaths in a few hours. The newspaper “Ce soir”, directed by Aragon, as well as “l'Humanité”, published, following this tragedy, pictures of the devastated city and the victims.
Picasso, shocked by the tragedy that affected his compatriots, redirected his studies towards the representation of what had just happened in Guernica. The painting is kept at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, but the Picasso National Museum in Paris has photos by Dora Maar, taken during its production in the studio. One can see the different states of evolution of the painting. Although he was listed as an anarchist in the French registries from the beginning of the century, it was not until the Spanish Civil War that Picasso really committed himself to a political cause. In addition to his aesthetic statement (through "Guernica"), he began militant exhibition projects and became involved with Spanish exiles who had taken refuge in France following the civil war.
The Spanish pavilion was inaugurated on July 12, 1937. In addition to "Guernica", two sculptures by Picasso were exhibited: "Tête de femme" (1931), now in the Musée National Picasso-Paris, and "La Femme au vase" (1933), now in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, as well as works by other Spanish artists such as Miró.

These murderous tragedies linked to the Spanish war shook Picasso. He brings them back into his work through the figure of the "weeping woman". These black widows, recurring in the work of Picasso, as "The Weeping Woman" or "The Suppliant", also refer to the bombings of Lleida (which took place successively in 1937 and 1938), which he obtained the pictures of Agustí Centelles, a Spanish photographer journalist.

Following the completion of "Guernica", Picasso refused to allow the painting to go to Spain, as long as "public freedoms [were not] restored", as he explained to his lawyer Roland Dumas 1. From its creation in 1937 to 1943, "Guernica" was shown in Europe, then in the United States (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco). It remained at MoMA (New York) for more than forty years. It returned to Spain in 1981, after the death of Franco and the political stabilization of the country. The monumental work is now on display at the Reina Sofia in Madrid and, for reasons of conservation, is no longer moved.

1 Lettre de Picasso à Roland Dumas, 14 novembre 1970

The year 1939 began with difficulty for Picasso. On January 13 his mother died in Barcelona. A few days later, the city fell to the Francoists. At the same time, since 1933, Hitler's regime had established itself in a large part of Eastern Europe. The exhibition on Degenerate Art, organized by the Nazis, presented four works by Picasso in Munich. This exhibition began on July 19, 1937, and has been circulating in all major cities in Germany and Austria for four years. More than 3 million visitors attended. The goal was to show the public art made by artists stigmatized as "sick" and on the fringe of a "superior race", as advocated by Hitler. Depressed by all these events, Picasso left for Royan to take the sea air, where he stayed until 1940. He followed from afar the beginnings of the second great world conflict: between September 1st and 3rd, Germany invaded Poland. France and Great Britain entered the war. Picasso returned to Paris the same year. His request for French nationality was refused because of his anarchist associations dating back to the 1900s, according to a police report. He then spent the whole of the Occupation in his studio on rue des Grands-Augustins.

In an interview for the magazine "Newsweek", Picasso recalls the visits of the Nazis in his studio. The link maintained with other resistant artists aroused the suspicions of the Gestapo, and Picasso himself was considered "degenerate". Finally, Maurice de Vlaminck, a collaborationist artist, published an article in the magazine Comœdia entitled "Opinions libres... sur la peinture" (Free opinions... on painting) in which he violently attacked Picasso. Following the publication of the text, many painters and intellectuals involved in the Resistance expressed their support for Picasso. Picasso completed one of his major paintings during the Occupation: "L'Aubade", executed in 1942, and now preserved at the Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou. He uses a theme that is familiar to him, that of female models. The unstructured forms, the cadaverous and tortured body, the naked room imprisoning the two women, as well as the rigidity of the stripes of the bed seem to evoke a certain death, close to that caused by the tragedies of war. The Musée national Picasso-Paris preserves all the drawn states.

In 1943, his "Tête de mort" (Head of Death) reflects the underlying fear and anxiety in which Picasso lived on a daily basis in Paris. Unlike other artists, Picasso broke away from the aesthetic obligations advocated by the Germans. The example of the sculptor Arno Brecker, a protégé of Hitler's, who was commissioned by the Nazi regime, contrasts with Picasso's sculpture "Man with a Sheep", which breaks away from these imposed codes. Here, Picasso makes his work a metaphor for freedom, with strong Mediterranean and ancient references.